[Patients' attitudes toward their psychosis after its long-term duration].

The aim of the study was to analyze frequency of various types of patients' attitudes toward their illness and correlations between these attitudes and other clinical and social variables. Attitudes of 107 patients suffering from delusional psychoses (70% of them schizophrenic) were studied during follow-up examination ca. 8.7 years after their first hospitalization and 11.2 years after the onset of their illness. The attitudes were assessed by the "Experience of Illness" scale. Its results were correlated with several measures--indices of intensity of hospitalization during the follow-up period, as well as patients' clinical and social functioning at the end of this period. The isolating attitudes predominated over the undecided and integrating (7:4:1). Integrating attitudes correlated with earlier age of the onset of illness, and paranoid structure of delusional syndroms. They also correlated sligthly with better life functioning as well as with lower intensity of residual symptomatology. No relationships between attitudes and nosological position of the illness (schizophrenia versus non-schizophrenia) were stated. The implications of results for future treatment programs is briefly discussed.